Saw that, it was a reflective moment. I really enjoyed her work, and when I was young, she was one of my first real branch outs into quality story telling.

The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

I barely have enough time to read my technical manuals and keeping up to date on change letters. Maybe when I retire I can read more for pleasure again. But I would love to get some old school SCFI again.

Diogenes wrote:Well you are in the business, surely you've read some new talent that approaches Heinlein, or Asimov, or de Camp.

Do you have any recommendations?

Me? A blog should come up next month on Analog's website in which I tell prospective writers that I got into writing SF after reading a couple of Heinlein novels and thinking I could do better. The piece will accompany a new story of mine which basically says Heinlein was dead wrong about the underlying thesis of a series of his books. I'm about 37,000 words into a novel at the moment, in which Heinlein is both praised and trashed.

paperburn1 wrote:I barely have enough time to read my technical manuals and keeping up to date on change letters. Maybe when I retire I can read more for pleasure again. But I would love to get some old school SCFI again.

I have Time Enough for Love in front of me at the moment, using the Intermissions as source material for my novel. But the book itself is a detestable fix-up of leftovers. I have Orphans of the Sky on order. It is required reading for the class of kids that are the main characters of my new novel. They are the products of a generation ship in which things went screwy, but a very different type of screwy than in Orphans. The main character's book review concludes that Heinlein was "pitching manure" because he imagined the ship could function at all under the conditions Heinlein proposed, and that he totally missed what befell their own ship ... the Heinlein. On their ship, what was lost was love, and they have to learn to do that again. They use Heinlein as one of their guides.

The main character, a young girl, admits that Heinlein does have some strong female characters, but she says they are basically his strong male characters, but with breasts. She notices that he writes about topping the woman you love and making a baby, but really does not seem to know much else about what it really takes to make a baby, something she will be expected to do many times.

However, her bucket list is Heinlein's quote that ends, "Specialization is for insects."

The following book review of Orphans of the Sky is not by me, but by Linsay 4926, a young girl from the Generation Starship Heinlein.

I have permission for my Orphans of the Sky report to be late, considering how busy I have been on more important things. Synopsis: Heinlein was pitching manure. He got it all wrong. Although, to be fair, I guess he did predict generation ships, and did understand that over such a long voyage, society could go screwy. And he predicted a mutiny (ours just almost happened). But to imagine people could survive at all without knowing how all their technology worked, in detail, is crazy. To think his characters would not know they were inside a ship was absurd … indeed, that fact weighed upon every member of the crew, generation after generation, a sentence with no reprieve. He imagined an insanely large ship, oblivious to the difficulties of building it. The much smaller Heinlein took the joint efforts of many nations to build. I estimate his ship would have had to have been twenty times the length and diameter of the Heinlein, meaning the volume and mass would have been eight thousand times greater than were actually deemed practical. The population he proposed was orders of magnitude beyond what was found necessary by later analysists. His proposed methods of feeding that immense crew were laughably inadequate and impractical. His power source seems to have been a hand-wavium nuclear technology that used fission of light elements to hydrogen, a process known (though by just a few years) at the date of publication to not yield energy. If they were routinely using human bodies as nuclear fuel, they would have been expending precious biomass. If he had stated that The Converter was a device for reducing bodies to nutrients, he would have been more credible. The body count was sickening. Are all of Heinlein’s stories this way? On the ship that bears his name, there have been no murders recorded in its entire history. Heinlein’s depiction of the treatment of women in this story is abhorrent! Is this the same writer who insisted that women must not settle for mere equality? If he had imagined what really went wrong, maybe we could have prevented it.